I must of missed this discovery due to how busy I was starting a new semester and everything. It appears that another new Dead Sea Scroll was recently discovered and it puts an end to the spurious claims of The Da Vince Code. I think it’s great that Brown’s book has now been debunked once and for all!

Here is an except of the article:

Translators in Jerusalem have just finished work on another of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This one, known as the Gospel of Peter, covers the time period after the crucifixion and proves many of the allegations of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code to be false.

I have updated my database based on the Hebrew vocabulary of Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Victoria Hoffer, and Rebecca Abts Wright, Biblical Hebrew: Text and Workbook, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005; Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com).

While the actual vocabulary has not changed much with the second edition, there are significant changes in how the vocabulary is presented and arranged. The entries for each word are expanded to include various examples of inflected forms (e.g., nouns in construct or with suffixes; verbs in various stems and forms, etc.). In order to facilitate memorization, the words (when appropriate) are now grouped according to their (supposed) etymological root. Thus, for example, עָלָה “go up,” עֹלָה “burnt offering,” עַל “on, upon,” and מַעַל “above” are grouped together. While this is a good move, it also creates a numbering nightmare since cognate terms are all given the same number (in the above example, the words receive the numbers 8, 8a, 8b, and 8c). While it is an improvement on the first edition, the new vocabulary has a number of errors and questionable inclusions, as well as some cases where the supposed roots are debatable.

The database includes all of the vocabulary from the second edition of Kittel, as well as a selection of frequent proper names and places. There are two databases available. The only difference between them is how the words are grouped.

• Vocabulary Organized by Lessons. This database has the words grouped according to when they are assigned in the lessons in Kittel. The disadvantage of this arrangement is that students will be responsible for anywhere from twenty-four to five words depending on the lesson. It also extends the memorizing of vocabulary throughout the entire textbook. (Lesson 53 is the extra section with proper names and places.)
• Vocabulary Organized by 20s. Rather than grouping words according to the lessons from Kittel, this database uses the chapter tags to organize the words into groups of twenty words. This allows students to build vocabulary at a constant rate throughout the year and also (depending on how you assign the vocabulary) allows you to finish it earlier in the year allowing more time for review.

The database works with Teknia Flashworks, a cross-platform vocabulary drilling program in which each word in the chosen database is tagged for type (noun, verb, etc.), chapter, and frequency in the biblical text. You may sort the words, for example, by chapter or randomly mix them for review. The software was developed by Teknia Software and William D. Mounce, the author of Basics of Biblical Greek and many other Biblical Greek resources.

The database is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Classic (OS 8.2 through 9.2). For more information and to download the database and program, see my “Resources for Kittel’s Biblical Hebrew: Text and Workbook” Page. (For those interested, I have also updated my “Introductory Hebrew Grammars” page)

The latest Review of Biblical Literature is now available. It includes a decent review of Ingrid Hjelm’s Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition by biblioblogger Jim West. That Jim enjoyed the work is apparent from his first sentence, though I have to balk at one of his concluding lines: “Those who would date the Hebrew Bible to the Hasmonean era now have a significant weapon in hand with which to wage the ongoing battle over biblical historiography.” I personally find it quite difficult to conceive of the Hebrew Bible undergoing major revision during the Hasmonean era (134-63 BCE) — let alone being written during that period. This is especially considering that most of it was already translated into Greek by that time! (See my “Towards the Date for the Old Greek Psalter,” in R. Hiebert, C. Cox, and P. Gentry (eds.), The Old Greek Psalter: Studies in Honour of Albert Pietersma [JSOTSup 332; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001] 248-276).

Also noteworthy in this issue are two reviews of Walter Brueggemann’s Worship in Ancient Israel: An Essential Guide and two reviews of George J. Brooke’s excellent work, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament.

The reviews are as follows:

• Walter Brueggemann, Worship in Ancient Israel: An Essential Guide. Reviewed by Thomas Kraus and Baruch A. Levine
• Sarah J. Dille, Mixing Metaphors: God as Mother and Father in Deutro-Isaiah. Reviewed by Marjo Korpel
• Ingrid Hjelm, Jerusalem’s Rise to Sovereignty: Zion and Gerizim in Competition. Reviewed by James West
• Jeremy Corley and Vincent Skemp, eds., Intertextual Studies in Ben Sira and Tobit. Reviewed by Thierry Legrand
• George J. Brooke, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Reviewed by Joerg Frey and Thomas Kraus

Reuters has an odd story about a stray dog who has become the newest acolyte at a temple on an outlying South Korea island. The dog, Hama, has learned to sit, stay and perform Buddhist prayer rituals alongside the monks.

Hmmm… Perhaps someone could knit Hama a nice little orange robe.

I came accross this très amusing cartoon about blogging:

From the New Yorker via Brad.Boydston.us.